Making life stories visible: an ethnographic study of body mapping in the context of HIV and AIDS in South Africa.

This paper analyses the lived experiences of people living with HIV in South Africa through the use of body mapping as a visual research method, by focusing on the physical and symbolic use of the body within the broader context of anthropology and medical anthropology. The study consists of an empirical analysis of the body maps themselves and the accompanied narratives of seven participants, six female and one male participant living with HIV in South Africa. Drawing upon theories and literature on theorising the body in medical anthropology and visual research, this study explores the significance of this practice as a visual research method in understanding the nuanced lived experiences of people living with HIV by highlighting the individuality of the body and emotions; embodied experiences: a bio-cultural approach; and the body politic: social injustice. The results of this study illustrate that body mapping is a unique visual research method, that explores the body as the vehicle in which we exist within the world, while containing a vast amount of layered interpretive and cultural meanings, which are key to understanding the lived experience of people from marginalised groups.

Mapping Acoustics to Articulatory Gestures in Dutch: Relating Speech Gestures, Acoustics and Neural Data.

Completely locked-in patients suffer from paralysis affecting every muscle in their body, reducing their communication means to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). State-of-the-art BCIs have a slow spelling rate, which inevitably places a burden on patients' quality of life. Novel techniques address this problem by following a bio-mimetic approach, which consists of decoding sensory-motor cortex (SMC) activity that underlies the movements of the vocal tract's articulators. As recording articulatory data in combination with neural recordings is often unfeasible, the goal of this study was to develop an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) model, i.e. an algorithm that generates articulatory data (speech gestures) from acoustics. A fully convolutional neural network was trained to solve the AAI mapping, and was tested on an unseen acoustic set, recorded simultaneously with neural data. Representational similarity analysis was then used to assess the relationship between predicted gestures and neural responses. The network's predictions and targets were significantly correlated. Moreover, SMC neural activity was correlated to the vocal tract gestural dynamics. The present AAI model has the potential to further our understanding of the relationship between neural, gestural and acoustic signals and lay the foundations for the development of a bio-mimetic speech BCI. Clinical Relevance- This study investigates the relationship between articulatory gestures during speech and the underlying neural activity. The topic is central for development of brain-computer interfaces for severely paralysed individuals.

Intermolecular Hydrogen Bonding between Water and Pyrazine.

Completely planar is the hydrogen-bonded complex of pyrazine and water (see sketch), which was obtained by supersonic expansion and investigated by rotational spectroscopy. The water molecule lies in the plane of the aromatic ring, and the lone pair of electrons on the nitrogen atom functions as the acceptor in the N⋅⋅⋅H-O hydrogen bond, not-as in the corresponding benzene complex-the π electrons.